The travel blog for polyglots

16. January 2018

Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian … What do they have in common?

Do you know what I really love about Istanbul? It’s the only city in the world in which I’m able to say that I’m going spontaneously for a short trip to Asia. And indeed I changed continents several times during my stay. This picture was taken near Topkapı Palace. In Turkish it means cannon gate, It was the place of administration and the domicile of sultans. Through this gate you can see the Bosporus which divides the city into the European and the Asian part. Turkeys geographical situation is also visible in the Turkish language as you will remember from my previous articles. Now you know how the grammar works and that it’s completely different than most of our European languages. However Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian have a similar grammar like Turkish and you might even notice very few similarities in the vocabulary. In all these languages word apple very similar: elma in Turkish, alma in Hungarian, omena in Finnish, õun in Estonian and алом (alom) in Mongolian. The preposition under standing after the noun is also quite similar: altında in Turkish, alatt in Hungarian, alla in Finnish and all in Estonian. Linguists still keep on arguing whether the Turkic and the Finno-Ugrian languages belong to one common language family. There are quite a lot of theories either confirming or denying it. However you can see that these languages got in contact with each other in the past. Maybe I already told you that I love learning agglutinative languages and I had a lot of fun with them. So if you are Turk, Finn or Hungarian you will learn another agglutinative language with ease. During my study I met a girl at university who was Turk and studied Korean cultural studies. I asked her whether it’s difficult for her to learn Korean. She said that it’s not that hard as she’s very familiar with the grammatical structure. By the way I have to admit you something. In this article I also mentioned Mongolian but that’s one language I still have to learn. But I will do my homework!